Week 9 Reflection

Week 9 Blog:

Did someone say angles or angels?

           Sometimes I feel so bad for acute angles because they always seem so depressed, it’s probably because they are never RIGHT. I also never ever really liked triangles, I always found them to be three-faced. In our last class, we focused on Patterns and Algebra and Lesson Planning. I thoroughly enjoyed the learning activities that were presented. Something that I felt should have been done differently was for the learning activity that covered simple algebra to go first and then followed by the activity that was a little more challenging. I personally never heard of the “Pan Balance method” AKA the inequality and equality method for teaching algebra. The activity was a little confusing at first but once I found a pattern, it was much easier to complete the activity.

           As a class we were assigned a math problem “total number of handshakes between 10 people if every person shook each other’s hand once”, and it was really cool to see how everyone reached their solution. Some took a simpler approach and broke the problem into pieces and then solved it, some students drew out a visual to picture it better, and some reverted to their previous knowledge and used equations to solve it. The way I came up with the solution initially was through visual and then I also created an algebraic formula. I liked that we did this with groups and when everyone displayed their solution, it was interesting to see so many different approaches to the problem.

My solution to the problem presented in class

           For this week’s class, we are doing Geometry and Spatial Sense. Currently, my grade 4 class at placement is also doing Geometry. We worked on attributes of shapes, specifically quadrilaterals. The students were presented with different types of quadrilaterals and the attributes that they needed to focus on were size lengths, angles, and the name of the shape. Another activity required students to use shape block manipulates to fill out an assigned pattern on the worksheet and show their understanding of the line of symmetry. As a grade 4 student, the expectations for the Geometry unit are identifying geometric properties of parallelograms; classifying two-dimensional shapes by geometric properties: "number of sides, angles, and symmetry; identifying a straight angle, a right angle, and half a right angle; constructing three-dimensional figures in a variety of ways;  performing and describing reflections"(pg. 64). The activity which my associate teacher did with the students followed all of the expectations listed for grade 4 students. The picture provided is something similar that we did in class, but I found it on Pinterest. Pinterest is a great resource to use to find activities to do in math class. Teachers post new activities daily and it is also a platform to share my work with others.

Line of symmetry activity

           In conclusion, we touched upon the three-part lesson planning. I am still currently brainstorming as to what topic I want to create a lesson plan on and how I want to follow through with it. I do think that this is a great way for us to start preparing for our internship period at our placements and our teaching period in January. The more practice and feedback we receive the better our lesson plans and templates will be.

Resouces:

Ontario Ministry of Education (2005). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8 Mathematics (revised). Retrieved from: http://www.edugains.ca or http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/ elementary/math18curr.pdfSmall, M. (2016) Making Math Meaningful to Canadian Students, K-8. Nelson (3^rd Edition)